Okay. I swore to myself I wasn’t going to let myself get sucked into this thread, but I can’t help it. The gravitational pull of Roddenberry Dependency is just too much.
Besides, I think I can spark a lively little debate with the following statement:
Resolved: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the absolute, undeniable worst of the series. Utter, total, unredeemable smelly crap.
And I can prove it. At length. In detail. Far more detail than any sane person would ask for.
So ask me. Aw, g’wan, ask me. You know you want to…
I don’t doubt it. There are persons out there who are complete loons about Star Trek.
So, with a certain amount of trepidation, I’ll bite.
Explain to me how #6 was worse than #5. I’ve always regarded the former as an adequate, if unspectacular movie, and the latter as a complete waste of celluoid, a mockery of all things Star Trek, and a thinly disguised attempt to see how fast one can get Gene Roddenberry to spin in his space capsule.
I will grant you that everything about the “Valeris” character makes me cringe.
And let me give you three more:[ul][li]How the heck did the entire crew of the U.S.S. Reliant fail to notice that Ceti Alpha VI had blown up? And that a totally different planet was now occupying its orbital slot? And conveniently forget that Ceti Alpha was the star system that Khan had been deported to, even though this deportation had not been kept secret from Star Fleet?[/li]
[li]How could the explosion of Ceti Alpha VI shift the orbit of Ceti Alpha V?! They’re two different planets, millions of miles apart in space, fer cryin’ out loud. Shock waves don’t travel through a vacuum.[/li]
The growing brain creatures are supposed to “wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex.” The cerebral cortex is the entire outer layer of the brain. They’d have to be ten or twenty times longer than the critters we see in the film to “wrap themselves” completely around something that large.[/ul]
Okay. I note for the record that you asked for it. There’s a lot. This may have to be a multipart post.
On general principles, the reason #6 is, to me, the worst one, is because it seems like a better movie than it really is…until you stop and think about any one part of the movie for more than thirty seconds. it’s like a badly-knit sweater: the more you pull at it, the farther it falls apart, until you are left with the remains of one of the laziest, worst-constructed, boneheaded, illogical screenplays I’ve seen in years.
Let’s start with the premise:
The Klingon moon Praxis, the key energy-producing facility for the Klingon Empire, has a catastrophic accident (caused by "over-mining and insufficient safety precautions) that will, in fifty years, result in a deadly pollution of the Klingon Empire’s ozone. The Empire hasn’t sufficient money to combat this disaster due to its enormous military budget. Therefore, the Klingons have sued for peace with the Federation.
If that paragraph seems like it makes no sense at all, that’s because it doesn’t – and it is, by the way, taken directly from several pieces of actual dialogue from the film, slightly paraphrased by me. It’s so full of illogical reasoning and gibberish science-fiction I hardly know where to begin, but I’ll try:
• Praxis produces most of the energy for the entire Empire. We must assume that a galactic empire is composed of at least one home planet and tens, perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands, of worlds stretched across an uncountable number of light-years. How can the physical resources of a SINGLE MOON support the energy needs of such an entity, to the extent that its destruction would plunge the Empire into a crisis that threatens its very existence? And how, in god’s name, is the energy delivered? Broadcast power? Tankers hauling coal?
• How – just how – do you make a moon explode by mining it too much?
• The explosion of Praxis, according to Spock, has created “a deadly pollution of their ozone.” How in HELL can the explosion of a moon affect the ozone on the moon’s primary in the slightest? And even if it did, why don’t the Klingons abandon their homeworld and move to one of their tens or hundreds or thousands of annexed planets? It’s a GALACTIC EMPIRE, for christ’s sake – they must move entire populations with little more difficulty than you or I change apartments!
You get the idea – and this is just in the film’s first ten minutes. The entire movie is CRAMMED with stuff like this, and for one very simple reason: Nicholas Meyer isn’t telling a Star Trek story, or any kind of science-fiction story: he’s telling a thinly (VERY thinly) disguised metaphor for the end of the Cold War, and every bit of plotting and psuedoscience is nothing more than the Chernobyl Incident, dressed up in the flimsiest technobabble imaginable. Meyer doesn’t even bother to analyze a single one of his premises to see if they hold water. The clear attitude here is, “Fuck it, I’m making a statement about detente, and i want people to know that’s what I’m doing, and I don’t have time for all this nonsense about scientific accuracy, narrative consistency, or storytelling logic.”
It gets worse. Much, much worse. But I’ll hold that back for the next post, assuming people want to read it.
IMHO, The Wrath of Khan was the best movie ever made, period.
Of course, I have been known to cite Gentleman’s Agreement as my favorite movie under certain circumstances. But in my heart I know that nothing will ever be better than TWOK.
As for those odd numbers, V is definitely the worst, and III is the best.
Among non-Star Trek fans, The Voyage Home usually wins – it’s the most accessible of the films.
Enh. Upon re-viewing, ST: V isn’t as bad as I thought it was. And there are good bits. I actually laughed when Scotty knocked himself out, but it would have been much better as a throwaway gag than as a plot point. (IIRC, the ship later gets into a fix because they can’t find Scotty, right?)
Pardon me for stealing your thunder, but I think I see where you’re going. For example, Chancellor Gorkon is killed with an elaborate plot using a prototype Bird of Prey to frame Kirk for the murder. Later, the plot to assassinate the UFP president involves… a guy with a rifle in the window (wearing a rubber mask in the extended version). Granted, the conspirators would still have acheived their goal, but there did seem to lose some imagination.
Thus, it can fairly be said that ST6 benefits from not being an odd-numbered Trek film. I mean, Insurrection is not that much worse than First Contact IMHO, but it has the cachet of a doomed odd-numbered flick.
And since this thread is about the odd-numbered movies, I won’t point out that Wrath of Khan also contains a continuity error as Khan is approaching the initial rendezvous with Enterprise with Captain Terrell standing in the background, ostensibly after he was left back at Regula One.
Oh, those certainly figure in the complete, unexpurgated version of my Star Trek VI rant, but you’re a long way from stealing my thunder, Thee. There is a monumentally stupid scene, plot twist, or line of dialogue an average of every five to ten minutes, all the way through the movie, and some of them are so dumb that they make the mere fact of the boneheaded assasination plot look like brilliance.
Let me give you, at random, another one of my favorites, since I’m here and already typing, okay?
Scene: after Chancellor Gorkon has been assasinated, Scotty remarks that his daughter, Azetbur (where do they get these names?) obviously is faking her sorrow over the incident, since “that bitch did not shed one bloody tear.” (Which is simply one in a long line of moments wherein Meyer twists the Star Trek characters into nasty, bigoted shitheads to drive home his point that Prejudice is Bad, but that’s another rant.) Spock responds calmly to this: “Hardly conclusive, since Klingons have no tear ducts.”
Okay. Let’s not even talk about the annoying tendency that people who make sf movies often have, which is to give aliens illogical attributes that make no sense merely to prove they’re aliens. (They are humanoid aliens with eyes that seem to work exactly like human eyes, and those eyes are always moist, just like eyes are… so if they don’t have tear ducts, what the hell do they have?)
Let’s just talk about the simple fact that all the Klingons in this movie are being played by humans – that being the only kind of actor currently available outside of the Babe films – and guess what? They all have tear ducts. Whenever there’s a closeup of Christopher Plummer or David Warner in their bumpy rubber heads, why, there they are, plain as day, pink, shiny and moist… tear ducts. I can see 'em. They’re right there.
What bugs me is not the tear ducts, really: it’s how criminally lazy the writing is. How much harder would it have been to simply rethink the scene just a LITTLE more, and come up with this:
SCOTT: Her father is dead, and that bitch did not display a single bloody trace of emotion!
Spock and Valeris turn silently to Scott, eyebrows on the rise. There is an uncomfortable pause as Scott realized what he’s just said, and who he’s said it to.
SPOCK (ironically): That is hardly conclusive, Mr. Scott.
Now what do we have? The point about Scott’s unconscious racism is made much more strongly, and, better yet, its done in terms of what we already know about these characters – not in terms of some silly technonsense.
I got the impression that there was a racism concept to the film that was dropped. After the Klingons leave the dinner Kirk says “Did you smell them?” which seemed very un-Trekian. They didn’t go anywhere with it.
Actually, the line survives in the final film, spoken by one of the two crewmembers who turn out to have been the ones who beamed onto the Chancellor’s ship and ventilated some Klingons. The complete line is: “What about that smell? And you know only top-of-the-line models can even talk.” (Implying, I guess, some “urban legend” in the 23rd century that Klingons are all genetically engineered, or something.)
There was an even worse example, which was cut from the script because Nichelle Nichols absolutely refused to say it: “Would you want your sister to marry one?” As it is, Uhura is scandalized because of the way the Klingons eat, prompting Chekov to chime in, “Terrible table manners!” To his credit, Walter Koenig read the line as if Chekov was gently kidding Uhura.
Even Shatner, who we don’t normally think of as terribly concerned about such stuff, was bothered by Kirk’s line, “Let them die!” He asked Nicholas Meyer to shoot a moment where Kirk looks momentarily ashamed of himself for saying it. At length, Meyer agreed to shoot it, but apparently had no intention of putting it into the final cut, and indeed, it isn’t there.
I didn’t mean that the line was dropped, I meant that there should have been a reason for it; the only reason I could find was the reference to “all humanoid life” which offended the Klingons, yet I would think that being primate-like counted as humanoid even if your blood was pink.
(Which is another change with the forehead ridges to be argued about )
Do you have a cite about Nichols refusing to say her line? I am curious.
I’d believe tankers hauling antimatter. A kilo of antimatter’ll buy you 1.8 x 10[sup]17[/sup] Joules of energy (that’s fifty billion kilowatt-hours) if you annihilate it with a kilo of ordinary matter you’ve got lying around.
And you can pack a heck of a lot of kilograms of antimatter into one starship. (Assuming your containment units don’t weigh too much.)
Yeah, I can see that. All right… you’ve found one way in which the basic situation of Star Trek VI makes some kind of scientific sense.
But on the heels of that, we’ve got moments like the one wherein Spock mentions that the Praxis explosion has caused “a deadly pollution of [the Klingons’] ozone”. Yeah, er… polluted ozone… that’s a real big problem, isn’t it? A wonderful example of taking two environmental buzzwords and slapping them together in a way that makes no sense whatsoever. I can just hear the screenwriters now: “Well, what kind of ecological disaster can we come with? Um, there’s pollution… and then there’s the ozone layer… so let’s say that the Klingons are suffering from polluted ozone! Yeah, that’s the ticket…!”
Do they actually say that Praxis supplies most of the energy of the Klingon Empire, or do they just say that it’s the key facility? There’s a huge difference. Maybe it just produces, say, a third of the energy used on the homeworld (and capital), with the remainder coming from two dozen scattered sites planetside. That’d be plenty for it to be the “key facility of the Empire”. And sure, the Klingons probably have the technology to evacuate. Why would they want to, though? Put yourself in their shoes. If something were about to happen to Earth, would you try to do what you could to stop it, or just give up and (along with all the other inhabitants) leave? If us Earthlings wouldn’t do it, what makes you think that stubborn Klingons would?
The ecological hoo-ha regarding Praxis is not a major problem with the plot of STVI. An intense gamma-ray burst can create nitrogen oxides in a planet’s upper atmosphere, which would gobble up the ozone. This would allow UV rays in, and ultimately destroy the planet’s biosphere. I don’t know if 50 years is a plausible time scale, but I have no problem believing that Kronos’ atmosphere was royally fried by an explosion on its moon (an explosion which tosses starships several light-years away).
(Incidentally, Earth’s atmosphere was sizzled somewhat on August 27th, 1998 by a flare from an X-ray star 23,000 light-years away. See http://hail.stanford.edu/gammaray.html )
Granted, STVI still has nonsense like Spock’s ancestor Sherlock Holmes, the ridiculous scene with the Klingon language books, and the galley!
I’m of the belief that Spock was making a joke about Holmes being his ancestor; he makes the Nixon joke, and throughout this film is pretty relaxed compared to his TOS self.
